Janet; Or, The Christmas Stockings

The slums of New York come alive in this devastating novella: a world where children kick their legs just to see their stockings, where a girl's Christmas gift becomes her only proof that someone in the world cares. Janet is thirteen, living in a tenement with her family, when a benevolent Bishop gives her and her siblings beautiful stockings for Christmas. It's a moment of grace in otherwise unrelenting hardship. Then diphtheria takes everyone. Then she finds a friend in Roy, a street-wise newsboy who promises to protect her. Then he too is gone, taken by a tragic accident. What remains is a girl standing alone under a vast starry sky, holding onto nothing but memory and the thin thread of hope that kindness might still exist somewhere. Gibbons writes with unflinching tenderness about the poorest of New York's poor, crafting a story that understands how quickly innocence is lost and how enduring that loss remains.